


another life

by beardsley



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-12
Updated: 2013-08-12
Packaged: 2017-12-23 06:11:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/922940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beardsley/pseuds/beardsley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chuck can be a girl's name, too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	another life

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Vienna Teng. Thanks to [quigonejinn](http://archiveofourown.org/users/quigonejinn/) for enabling my Chuck and lady!Chuck feelings.

It's a tired old cliche: meet a girl, fall for a girl.

Lose a girl.

There's a twist, though. There is always a twist.

But hey, Chuck can be a girl's name, too.

She meets Mako Mori for the first time when both of them reach no higher than their respective fathers' waists. Chuck doesn't speak Japanese and Mako doesn't speak English, but children don't need to speak the same language to understand each other perfectly. It's not an understanding that passes between them that day. It's a spark.

It will take Chuck years to realise what it means, to place that lingering feeling of unease in the pit of her stomach and give it a name. She's not a romantic and she's not naive, even as a child and then as a teenager. Her naivete dies with her mother, or maybe it's killed by her father, and a soldier has no time for romance. One way or another she's not stupid. No, it's more than that. The therapists at Lima keep saying it's because she's a survivor, and Chuck wants to laugh in their faces. She's fourteen years old and there is one thing she knows about the world: survivors aren't the lucky ones.

~

One of her earliest memories is of her father saying, 'I've the two best girls in the world. Don't need anything else.'

~

Charlotte Hansen is not a pretty girl. She's a soldier raised in a family of soldiers. Her father taught her to be honourable and the best; her uncle taught her to be dangerous. She keeps her hair barely skimming the edge of regulation length and it reaches her jaw, curls at the ends just a little when the air is humid (which is often). The way she brushes it off her face when it gets into her eyes has been called boyish.

She's been called boyish a lot, though never by Mako.

Mako Mori is a pretty girl. Of course, if you called her that to her face she'd smile icily and start plotting your messy, violent beatdown. She walks the line between keeping her head down and excelling at everything she tries, like some people do. She has so many natural talents Chuck has stopped counting. Sometimes it feels like she only follows Mako around, trails behind her like an eager puppy from when they're young to when they're not so young any more.

~

'You should name it something cute,' says Mako. She lets the puppy lick her face and squirms a little when it gets to her ear.

'Cute,' Chuck repeats incredulously. 'I'm naming it something fuckin' _fierce_.'

The two of them find the dog in a cardboard box in a back alley. It looks like there was a whole littler, but there is just the one floppy-eared bulldog left by the time they get to it. Mako is besotted and the puppy loves her on sight. It's not a surprise. Mako Mori has that effect on some. Chuck fists her hands at her sides until her nails cut into the meat of her palms and she forces herself to relax.

They are fourteen.

Three months later Mako is accepted into the Academy and it will take Chuck months again to follow. Mako will be there for her opening ceremony and she will smile at Chuck all through Mr Pentecost's welcome speech. She shows Chuck where her quarters will be (she says they're small and she says she feels a little claustrophobic sometimes, but Chuck's not been raised in spacious houses by old traditional families like Mako — small and cramped she can do, no problem), and then she shows Chuck to her own room. There are jaeger schematics hung up on the wall next to her bunk. Chuck recognises the Coyote Tango blueprints.

She hangs nothing on her walls.

She puts two photos on her desk. The first is of her and her mother (it's torn on the right side; there was a third person in it). The second is of her and Mako, dirty with mud like a pair of unruly cats and grinning like lunatics. They were kids then, as much as any girls could be kids in a world filled with monsters crawling out of the depths of the ocean.

~

So when does Chuck Hansen lose the girl?

Is it when they're fifteen and Chuck can't let Mako be at the top of her class, because she needs that spot for herself to try to convince herself her father made the right choice? She spars with a vicious ferocity that catches Mako off-guard at first, but then Mako sets her jaw and matches her. Chuck never picks a bokken or a hanbo, because she knows very well who Mako's family were. She's not stupid. She picks escrima sticks and tonfa and, on one memorable occasion, she picks her bare hands.

But maybe she loses Mako after that.

Maybe she loses Mako in the immediate aftermath of Striker Eureka's first kill. Mako is not cross with Chuck when Striker is cleared for duty and Chuck joins her f— when she joins the ranks of active PPDC rangers, when she becomes the youngest woman to have ever piloted a jaeger. They're best friends, but they're competitive little shits when they want to be. Trying to one-up each other has always been just another game. It's not a game now; Chuck has something Mako wants desperately, with single-minded focus and determination. It's not Chuck's fault. Mako isn't _really_ unhappy because of her.

And as for Chuck — she's still high on adrenaline. This is what she's going to blame for the way she grabs Mako's wrists, both of them, like some dumb bloody schoolgirl. This is what she'll blame for pulling Mako close, her work uniform rustling against Chuck's flight suit. Mako is grinning at her when she says, ' _Antatachi wa sugoidatta_.'

Chuck can feel the flush in her face, the sweat beading at the back of her neck where her hair is tied into a messy ponytail, and she can feel her stomach tying itself into knots, but more than anything she feels invincible. She killed a monster and she's invincible, and then all she can feel is the warm press of Mako's lips as she leans in to kiss her.

~

That. That is when she loses the girl. Not because Mako doesn't want her; no, she does. They're both teenagers and before Chuck knows what's happening they're pawing at each other's uniforms with awkward desperation, stumbling over their own feet in their hurry to get to the nearest semi-private bathroom. It's messy and graceless, the way Chuck guesses it's supposed to go when you're screwing someone for the first time in your life.

Mako would slap the living daylights out of her if she heard Chuck call it that.

That night Chuck falls asleep with the best girl she's ever needed, her smile pressed against the soft skin of Mako's collarbone. She wakes up alone, but Mako sits opposite her in the mess hall at breakfast. Max shuffles over to lie down on her feet.

Nothing changes.

~

Everything changes.

~

Chuck Hansen is a rockstar. She goes on press tours. She gets photographed with her hand down a famous actor's pants. She gets photographed walking out of a club with mussed eye makeup and visibly, _obviously_ high as a kite. It's the first time her father raises his hand to hit her and stops himself at the last second, and Chuck doesn't get the sudden grief in his eyes until two weeks later when they sortie and he nearly loses himself in the memory of his brother's memory.

After they're done and she's back in her quarters, Chuck throws up, her hands shaking. She never wants to hear her uncle's name again.

While Chuck Hansen is busy being a rockstar, Mako Mori is busy being the best at everything she does. She's appointed head of the Mark III restoration project and even though Chuck jokes that Stacker must've pulled some strings, the joke falls flat. They both know Mako got to where she is by being a tenacious, unrelenting prodigy.

They screw after each of Striker's deployments. They screw hot and messy and as months pass and they stop eating breakfast together and Max seems to become the only way Chuck can communicate with anyone, screwing is all they're good at together any more. Chuck used to dream about piloting with Mako. They'd be fucking unstoppable, she thought. They'd be the best. Now she knows, in the way their bodies stutter and flinch on the rare occasions that they spar together, that it won't ever happen.

Not everyone is drift compatible, and it turns out that just because Mako Mori is the best girl in the world — just because Chuck doesn't need anyone else — doesn't mean that it's enough.

Naturally, Mako Mori is compatible with the biggest motherfucking cunt Chuck has ever met. Chuck calls it like she sees it: a disgrace. Mako moves like she's ready to break every bone in Chuck's body and for a moment Chuck hopes that's exactly what will happen; she can already taste blood in her mouth.

~

It's an open secret that after each Striker Eureka kill, the women's locker rooms and showers should be given a wide berth for at least an hour. You wouldn't want to walk in on Mako and Chuck. You wouldn't want to walk in on wordless growls and loud moaning that even running water can't drown out. You wouldn't want to walk in on the youngest woman to ever pilot a jaeger with her face buried between Marshall Pentecost's daughter's thighs.

Would you?

~

If Chuck can be a girl's name, then truth can be relative.

There is a world where Chuck Hansen gets into the jaeger with Marshall Pentecost; she knows without a doubt that they'll be able to pilot it together, because all they need to focus on is the fight and the best girl they've loved. In that world, in the agonising moments before the detonation Chuck's mind is filled with the memory of Mako's hair between her fingers, and Mako's last words to her father and to her best friend are one and the same.

There is a world where Chuck Hansen fights Marshall Pentecost for the right to get into Gipsy Danger with Mako, and the argument that wins him over is, 'Who would you trust to keep her alive, some has-been stranger or me?' The argument that wins him over is the open secret that Chuck Hansen, despite her partying and misbehaving and fucking around, only has eyes for one girl. In that world Mako Mori surfaces in the middle of the ocean, with the low roar of choppers approaching in the distance. She waits.

She waits.

She waits.

She —


End file.
